OUR CHURCH MUSIC.

Auckland Star, Volume VII, Issue 1973, 6 June 1876, Page 3

OUR CHURCH MUSIC.

(To the Editor of the Star.)

Sib,-The question "What is music?" was once asked our great musician Mendelssohn, to which h8 replied : " Music is the language of the soul, the expression of its noblest feelings, the revelation, so to speak, of its future destiny." Without commenting further on these remarks, I should like to ask how rare the present psalmody of our churches approaches the ideas thrown out by one so well qualified to teach in this matter? Is it not a fact that the collection of tunes now in use in New Zealand have a tendency both to mar our worship and stultify its original design ? Let any musician, who understands harmony and the laws upon which it is built, take the New Zealand Hymnal, and impartially examine its contents; and what will they find? A number of the finest tunes deprived of their eTcellences which our worship demands, and a jargon of sounds introduced, at which the worshipper must feel little else than disgust. Look again at the remainder—those which claim to be of the modern school; and am I not right in describing them as consummate rubbish 1 Harmonies bad, adaptation bad —in short, taking one with another, such that our most common secular melodies shame. Only take an instance of this in the tunes ' Palestrina.' Where, may I ask, does the adaptation of this tune to its accompanying hymn rest ? except in the fact that it is distinguished more than many others for its discordance and musical arror ? How can t c true feelings of worship be exalted amid such a confusion of sounds, or how can it mix its sublime aspirations with duch an unqualified chaos ? Such music can have no tendency but this, to cov«r with opprobrium the soul's truest exercise, to weight its wings with an unnecessary encumbrance, when it would soar away from surrounding materialism and refresh itself with sweetest melody. Why should we not have in our churches the best music ?—the best in every sense in place of a compilation of melodies, whose beauties have bean replaced with inaccuracies, until many of them may justly be calledanything &ftK ,7 v :■ . . v - ' .:

hut music? Purely there is reform wanted here—reform of no mean importance, and the sooner we have it the better. There is more room for it now than there ever was, and we may share still more than formerly in the poets surprise,—

Strange that there should such difference be Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.

Let us have done with the bygone age in this respect, and have no more, " tweedledum and tweedledee." I am, &c, Disgust.